21923 - SCTE Broadband Aug2023 COMPLETE v1 (1)

45 Vol. 45 No. 3 - September 2023 Issue from the industry broader and the agenda reflects that. The most obvious theme is the project rollout, the nuts and bolts of building the network. What you do with the network though is really where the event’s evolved. As a show we are very agnostic about what kind of technology it is, whether it’s fibre, or whether it’s wireless technologies. I don’t think that matters. I don’t think to the user it should matter. They just want something that works. It’s about customer services as well. That’s a big part of it now. RC: It’s customer service, it’s how you close the digital divide. It’s about what people do with it, work, pleasure or public services being digitally enabled. It’s bringing those things together, it’s about the skills gaps, both for the public, but also for the industry and how you can close those skill gaps. I think the debate has moved on; increasingly we’re hearing companies saying, ‘well, what about when you get in the premises, or inside the building?’ Or if it’s a venue, or a stadium, or something like that when you get inside the stadium? So the actual experience delivers on the promise of having strong connectivity to the venue. The consumer doesn’t care how that’s done. They just want it to work. We’ve all been in stadium situations where connectivity fails because there’s too many people. The network can’t cope. RC: Quite right. Events, normally. I hope you’ve got a good broadband provider… RC: Ironically that one’s normally out of our control. From the public’s point of view, they shouldn’t have to think about it, should they? You should be able to leave your house, be on the network, get in the car, go somewhere, still be on the network. Get to work, or get to the shopping centre, still be on the network; it should all be seamless. That should be the end game. We’re still quite a way from achieving that. Compared to other markets we are some way behind the curve, but there’s a will, demand and the finance in some shape of form, to improve it. What’s different on the editorial side this year? RC: Connected communities is a new track for 2023; looking at connecting rural and hard to reach communities with focus on things like social housing, schools, critical services and so on. Obviously, sustainability is a growing issue for everyone; we’ve got some panel discussions on sustainability around digital infrastructure and reaching net-zero. We’ve got some things as well about the network rollout. A few years ago, everyone was talking about ways to supercharge the existing copper infrastructure they had. You don’t often hear that now. They’re mostly talking about replacing copper infrastructure and switching off of old legacy networks. There’s the development of 5G and use-cases for this from businesses, the health sector and so on. We’re starting to see real deployments, rather than just interesting test cases. 5G hasn’t actually dominated the market perhaps in quite the way that people would’ve expected. A year ago people were really excited about 5G, and what a game changer it was going to be. That hasn’t quite happened - everyone’s talking about AI now. RC: It is all about AI, isn’t it? I’m sure that in a year or so’s time, even that will be moving on a little bit. The telecoms industry has always been fantastic at talking about the next big thing. One of the biggest changes is the shift from there being a quite distinct set of telecom vendors, and a separate set of IT vendors, and now we’re actually seeing that it’s all converging into one space. They are by and large the same companies now. I think it’s also interesting when you look at how the whole product landscape has changed as well. The distinction between vendors and operators and how they interact with customers in particular, with business and enterprise customers has changed as well. They’re often competing with each other in that space. That includes the big integrators because they’re all basically offering different ways of applying similar solutions to customers. It must be challenging to be at the forefront of an industry that is moving so fast. RC: The biggest challenge for my team is ensuring things go forward, that we evolve as a show. It’s always a challenge to move the debate on. It’s important to be listening to what the industry’s saying to us, what people think the next big trends are. And that is the skill of our producers and their knowledge